Chaim Seidler-Feller

Smol Emuni Conference
March 30, 2025

In 1958, my teacher, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, presented the following in a public lecture:

The Jew has experienced persecution and brutality. We never had a state. We never had political power. What if we had a state in the Middle Ages? How would we have acted? Would we have acted just like the feudal lords or would we have acted differently because of Jewish values? Who knows? Now, with the State of Israel, the test has come. We're facing the test. Will we behave like any other state ethically? Will we restrain ourselves from engaging in certain practices which are in conflict with basic Judaic ethics? Or will we yield to temptation? Here we have an opportunity. The Jews are the rulers. They legislate the laws. They are, so to say, the masters. Will we act like masters, or will we understand that Judaism doesn't know the concept of master and slave, victor and vanquished, powerful and weak? This is my problem with regards to the state of Israel. The whole of Jewish history will be interpreted in terms of what the State of Israel will do in the next 50 years. If the State of Israel doesn't live up to Jewish ethics, people will reinterpret Jewish history in a whole different light. The question is not whether Israel will defeat the Arabs on the field of battle, but whether we will defeat our evil within our own community and be victorious in this field.

To me, this is the most important problem. So what's the judgment? What's the decision?

The question is this: Can there be an ethically principled and restrained Jewish nationalism? What role will Judaism play in relation to that nationalism?

There was a famous conversation between Ben-Gurion and the scientist, philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who's spirit somehow hangs over us today. Lubavitch confronted Ben-Gurion and asked: ‘why did you, Ben-Gurion, an avowed secularist, establish a Chief Rabbinate?’ Ben-Gurion responded: ‘you, Leibowitz, you seek the separation of religion and state so that religion can return to being an independent factor with which the ruling government has to contend. You want religion to be an opposition. I reject this separation because I want the state to hold religion in its hand. I want politics to control religion.’

Ben-Gurion was a clever, even autocratic politician. He carried the day, and we are paying for it.

I want you to remember that in 1967, there were only two ministers in the government who voted against responding to Jordan. The two religious cabinet ministers in the government opposed it because they said: ‘what are we going to do when we capture the territory?’

What a question to ask. What are we going to do with the Palestinians? We have no plan. The religious ministers were the only ones who opposed. But we are gathered here today, I think, to proclaim that we're the students of Soloveitchik and Lebowitz, and not of Ben-Gurion.

We want, to reclaim the honor of Judaism so that our religious values act as a check and a control on the excesses of a Jewish statist nationalism, so that the nationalism, the לְאוּמִיוּת, doesn't become chauvinism, לְאוּמָנוּת. Front and center in my mind, is rather a mere admonition that nationalism is the idolatry of our time. And the concomitant challenge is: will our nationalism be different? Maybe that's arrogant to think that it can be different.

What I intend to do is offer a textual example of religion as a restraint on nationalism, and then outline the elements of a nationalism of values. That is what I call a Zionism of values, ala achad ha’am, as against a Zionism of power, ala Jabotinsky.

The first Rashi in the Chumash is familiar to many of you. Rashi asks: ‘why does the Torah begin our book? Why does our book not begin with our laws, but with the creation of humanity?’ And Rashi answers according to the standard reading. ‘Indeed, the Torah does begin with our law, the law that we have an absolute right to the land that's been promised.’ That is, since God is the creator, God is the grand real estate agent who can decide who gets God's property. At first, God gave it to the Canaanites, but after they lost their right, God gave it to us for keeps.

I'd like to propose a different understanding where Rashi is saying God is no longer a powerbroker, but a moral educator. That's God's real job. In this reading, Rashi is actually saying that the creator transmits the right to the land conditionally, and that just as the Canaanites forfeited their right because they failed to maintain the standard of morality, so too could we lose our right. If we're not virtuous, the land will vomit us out rather than granting us a free ride. The Torah, true to character, opens with a warning and a demand that if we are to dwell in the land of promise, we must live up to that promise. In this way, our religious guidebook, at the outset, lays down the moral principle that is, to serve as a control on unrestrained nationalism.

The elements of a value based nationalism to which I aspire are the following:

Element Number One: an inclusive nationalism, where the other is our brother. When I first met David Hartman in 1979, he said to me, ‘the most important religious question that we face is how to govern a minority.’ That's when I knew that I had found my teacher. It's not an accident that my teachers were Jews who stressed traditional Judaism that was grounded in ethics, both Rabbi Soloveitchik and his student Hartman. As Yitzhak Rabin wrote to Jonathan Sacks in 1995, “we did not pray for nearly two millennia for the return to Zion, only to find ourselves ruling over another people.” The occupation is the most un-Jewish of projects from a religious perspective. We must struggle with all our considerable energy to end the occupation.

Element Number Two: a consciousness that, having returned to the land, we are simultaneously both at home and humble strangers in that very land. Rabbi Yeshayahu Horowitz, the Shelah HaKadosh, who left Prague for Tzfat and Jerusalem in the 16th century, wrote “the principle that is derived is that those who dwell in the land must, as a consequence of their being in a state of submission, act like strangers and not make the main object to settle in a permanent, steadfast manner, as was expressed by King David, who said, “I am a stranger in the land.” George Steiner writes about similar ideas. We are all guests in this world. If we could only learn that we're all guests, the world would be a very different place.

Element Number Three: the wisdom that human life is to be privileged over territory. As Rabbi Soloveitchik declared, “I know something about the sanctity of the land of Israel, but I am aware of another sanctity, the sanctity of each human being. And when the moment arrives, when we have to make a determination, then the sanctity of human life will be a deciding factor that will take precedence over territory.”

Element Number Four: war must be a last resort, not a political option. This was the profound teaching of Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, who was a chief rabbi of Tel Aviv from 1935 to 1946. He wrote, “truly God proclaimed only one war to be obligatory, a milchemet mitzvah, an obligatory war, and that is the war against the War of Amalek. It is the war against wars in general.” Our task, our noble mission as a nation, according to Rav Amiel, is to champion the book against the sword, and in the name of Torah and God, educate others to defeat the impulse to warfare.

Element Number Five: the abiding truth, as Leibowitz asserted again and again, is that the state is only an apparatus. The state is an instrument where we have an opportunity to see if Judaism works as we attempt to build a moral society. There can be no holiness attached to the state, that's idolatry, nor any messianic significance. The only religious significance of the state is as a laboratory for the fulfillment of our ideals of justice, equality, and peace. As David Hartman wrote “Religious Zionism does not need to treat the rise of Israel as a divine ruse on the way toward realizing the messianic kingdom. In Israel, the moral quality of the army, social and economic disparities and deprivations, the exercise of power, attitude towards minorities and the stranger, tolerance and freedom of conscience, these are all realms that may engage our sense of covenantal responsibility.

Finally, in conclusion, a word about Pesach, and from my teacher, Rabbi Soloveitchik. He asks the question, ‘how come when we recite the arami oved avi passage, the wandering Aramian passage, we don't comment and we don't recite the last verse, “you brought us into this land,” even though the mishnah requires that we read the entire passage.’ There are classic answers to this. The answer he offers is that the land of Israel is only the destination. Sinai is our destiny.

The question before us is, can we bring our destiny, Sinai, to bear on our destination, on the land of Israel? The future of Israel is at stake as well as the future of Judaism, and it's in our hands to make a difference.